We are talking to ourselves. We are not talking to the river, we are not listening to the river. We have broken the great conversation. By breaking that conversation, we have shattered the universe.

– Thomas Berry

IN MY MID-SIXTIES, I began swimming with pond turtles with no thought of reviving what cultural historian and philosopher Thomas Berry called ‘the great conversation’. In fact, as a science-loving psychologist, I didn’t believe such a conversation was possible in modern times. Now I have a different point of view.

Eighteen years ago, I moved to a seaside village on Cape Cod on the north-eastern shore of the United States. Finding the ocean there too dangerous, I swam in ponds. I waded through mud the consistency of yoghurt ever on the lookout for fifty- and sixty-pound snapping turtles. I dived in, swam and got out as fast as possible.

Then late one afternoon, I went for a swim as the sun set behind trees and long shadows reached across the water. I felt I was swimming through chambers in a cave. I stroked through shadows until up ahead I spotted a bright pool where slanting shafts of sunlight streamed onto the pond floor. Into the sun I swam, then back into darkness. At first I favoured the sunlight and felt anxious when I re-entered the dark where I saw almost nothing until my eyes adjusted. But soon I preferred the shadows. Swimming there made me feel like a fish. No longer on top of the water, I was in it.

Suddenly, there in front of me hanging a foot below the surface were two small grey turtles. Sweeping my arms forward to avoid hitting them, I found myself an arm’s length away from two beady-eyed reptiles. They looked straight at me. My first thought was ‘effortless’. Like five-inch-long astronauts, they were perfectly balanced and suspended. With the merest flick of a fan-shaped foot, one turtle spun and approached my hand while the other glided over my rigidly outstretched arm. I could see their domed shells were unmarked, their sinewy feet webbed and their heads the shape of needle-nose pliers.

‘Clearly not the harmless painted turtles I see basking on logs,’ I thought, picturing shiny black shells with splashes of colour, ‘so they must be…’

With a jolt of terror, I leapt to the conclusion that these were baby snapping turtles and that their mother was steaming to their rescue. Lurching to the side, I thundered past them. Heart pounding, toes tingling, I panted and spluttered back to the beach.

‘Why didn’t they run away?’ I wondered. ‘What did they want?’

Although reluctant to return to that pond, I was hooked. I wanted to see those brazen little turtles, which I learnt were not snappers but common musk turtles. Active only at dawn and dusk and rarely emerging to bask, they belonged to a wild, nearly invisible world. Most of them scurried away as soon as they saw me coming, but not all. As one or two swam up to my mask, their mottled grey shells gleaming in the evening sun, their flickering feet spinning them first one way then another. I was captivated. Free of gravity and time, we hung together in a kind of paradise. Life was good.

One night as I lay in bed, I pictured them climbing upward through a column of light.

‘This is where I want to live forever,’ I thought to myself, ‘in this strange and beautiful place where I am beautiful too.’

I wasn’t aware of it then, but from that night forward I started feeling my way along a path. Somehow, someday I would learn where this electric fascination came from, where it led, and how it could be mine for the rest of my life. I was in this adventure solely for me. If I had been told that my interest in turtles would upend everything I knew about nature and land me in a genuine conversation with them, I would have laughed.

IN THE COURSE of following turtles, I embarked upon an eighteen-year, 1,500-mile journey. I swam in all weathers, at all times of day, and in every season except winter. During the day I worked as a psychologist. In the evenings I looked at the underwater world of turtles from as many different angles as possible. Thus in my spare time I became a self-taught naturalist and a writer and illustrator of children’s books on turtles. I taught grade schoolers about pond life and, as a conservationist, started the clean-up organisation Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage. In other words, I studied turtles, drew turtles, talked about turtles, protected turtles. Eventually, I began to see them. Of all the different ways I looked at turtles, studying them like a naturalist was the easiest, drawing them the hardest. As a self-taught naturalist I set up simple experiments. I confirmed that musk turtles were territorial. They were scavengers. They mated throughout spring and summer, laid one or two eggs on shore, and hibernated underwater in winter. This kind of information fit my understanding of how the world worked. I was the smart, thinking one doing the observing. They crawled around being observed.

Yet even in my science years, I had to modify my thinking. I couldn’t hunt for turtles as I would a rare plant. I had to wait until they felt like appearing. Turtles didn’t act like a ‘thing’ I could study.

Drawing them forced further modifications. Signing up for lessons to better illustrate my books, I found myself in class staring at a tea service on a pleated tablecloth. Every week my teacher moved the tea set around, quoted Monet, and left.

‘To see, we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at.’

Neither wondering nor caring what Monet meant by that, I drew cups and saucers that floated awkwardly above a forest of parallel lines that should have looked like pleats. Eventually, I stopped seeing cups and saucers and instead saw shapes – a baby step in the right direction.

‘Pretend you’ve never seen these things before,’ said my teacher. ‘They are strange, foreign objects and you are the first to discover them.’

So I drew that still life as if I had come upon it in the jungle. The harder I tried to draw only and exactly what was there, the more exhausted I was at the end of the lesson. It took tremendous effort to override the assumptions of a lifetime. I had to look without thinking.

After eight weeks, I began copying photographs I’d taken underwater with a camera built into my dive mask. I drew turtles sitting, turtles swimming, turtles seen from above and below. There was a surprising amount of variation. The more I looked without thinking, the more I questioned the concept of an ‘average’ turtle.

By this time I had spent so many hundreds of hours in ponds, I had gained an understanding of the entire pond system. I knew where and when to find turtles. I knew what they liked and disliked. If I wanted one to come to me, I approached slowly, made eye contact, then backed away as if a little afraid. Up to my mask it would swim. My turtles didn’t act like those described in field guides.

One afternoon, I was warily watching a snapping turtle when I was poked sharply in the neck. A cloud of bubbles blew from my snorkel as I screamed. A painted turtle darted away only to bank sharply and try again. It came slicing through the water, its colourful pink and orange striped legs going so fast they were a blur.

‘Am I in your territory?’ I asked, propelling myself backwards.

As the turtle dive-bombed me, I wagged it away with a finger. Finally I swam hard for the beach. His odd behaviour reminded me of a story.

According to a Native American tale, all turtles were originally grey. One of these drab creatures made his way out of the river and up a hill to visit a lovely princess. Every day it tried to catch her eye by crawling back and forth in front of the girl and her father. Neither noticed him.

After days of frustration, the turtle finally decided to ‘paint up’. Taking out his war paints, he covered his entire body in shiny black then added yellow stripes across his back and orange and pink lines running from either side of his nose, down his neck, across his broad shoulders and along the outside and inside of each arm and leg. Now in full war paint, he again climbed the hill. The effect was electric. What the chief’s daughter saw before her was a darkly handsome man decorated with blazing colours. She married him.

After the ceremony, the turtle led his bride to the river and walked in. The princess baulked.

‘I can’t live with you.’

‘Step into the water,’ the turtle urged, but she was afraid. ‘Step into the water,’ he repeated, and when she did, she instantly became a turtle.

‘That’s what I’m trying to do too,’ I realised, but of course I couldn’t. The princess, who already believed she was closely related to all parts of the natural world, could picture herself joining a turtle far more easily than I could. Hers was a leap of faith, but not across the nearly unbridgeable chasm that divides people from nature today. I was stuck outside the world that supported my very life.

I spent the rest of the summer searching for mating pairs of turtles to film. Cold water and poor light made them hard to see. And they were shy. From books I learnt that turtles typically mate in spring but continue into the fall. I learnt their private parts are stored in the tail. I had noticed that male turtles had much longer, thicker tails than females. Inside each was a telescoping mechanism rather like the duster I used to clean ceilings. After a male hooked his long toenails over his partner’s shell, he whacked or even bit her neck. Finally, he extended his duster.

One October I found myself hovering over several musk turtles sitting on the bottom of the pond. Eventually, the male in the group came shooting toward me. He had an unusually dark face and he was clearly agitated. I held out my hands: he darted off to the right. I backed up: he darted off to the left. Back and forth he swam – not behaviour I had seen before.

‘What do you want?’ I asked.

Abruptly, the turtle disappeared behind me. In an instant I could feel him grab my wetsuit and climb toward my shoulder. Tiny pin pricks from his toenails marched up my back. Clinging to my shoulder, the turtle poked my neck with his pointed snout then launched himself and resumed strutting back and forth. At last I noticed his distended tail. It was sticking straight out and the bulge at the base was unmistakable. I was being hit on by a turtle.

Shocked and delighted, I instantly went from looking at this turtle to being with him. We swam in a common world. In a burst of excitement I realised this turtle had a plan – an opinion, a goal. Like me, he was a thinking being. Memories of the painted turtle tapping my neck leapt to mind. He too had been observing me while I’d been observing him. All the turtles had. They were individuals like me, hoping for a good life.

I should have realised this before. I had noticed distinctive details as I drew them – noticed their personalities. Yet I had carried my person-centred point of view into the water on every swim. I’d looked at everything solely in relationship to me. Did this friendly turtle help me get good photos? Did that patch of waterlilies prevent me from going where I wanted to go? Self-involvement and a lifetime of assumptions, not cold water and poor light, were what made it so hard for me to see.

I rested a moment on the border of two worlds looking at the dark-faced turtle and his harem, who paid no attention to my revelation. The joy I’d been chasing came from a relationship I hadn’t believed was possible. It came from dropping the privilege and isolation of being a person set above all other beings and re-entering the natural world as a simple participant. Finishing my swim in what was now a river of lives, I climbed out of the water into a different and much larger world.

After that swim my concept of the wonderland where I wanted to live changed. It was no longer a place or a thing – a pond full of turtles – but a relationship. Each time I recognised something as ‘like me’, another part of nature went from a ‘thing’ I could use to a being I could relate to.

Primed by my experience with the dark-faced turtle, I began staring at glowing mounds of moss in the last light of evening and rosehips glistening at dawn. Mostly nothing happened. However, I had learned to look without thinking, and every once in a while I’d feel a jolt as a stand of wet pines or a garter snake sprang to life. I could almost hear a click as the image entered my mind and an alliance was formed. With this came unexpected certainty. I felt I was seeing trees and snakes as they really were. Wonder seemed to put me in touch with the truth.

LIFE OPENED UP. Like a lone swimmer joining a swim meet of epic proportions, I found myself moving daily among thousands of individuals, each potentially ‘like me’. Without warning, each could do that trick where it suddenly went from a thing to a being. I had no control over the revolving door that stood between me and nature, but the more time I spent alone looking, the less alone I felt.

But were my feelings rational? There was a lot I didn’t understand about seeing a turtle as like me. So that winter, while turtles held their breath for five months and hibernated underwater, I put on my psychologist’s hat and looked into the science of awe.

Psychology, once leery of anything as subjective as wonder, is now fascinated to learn what happens when we are struck by awe. Moments ranging from a ‘wow’ as we watch a swallow’s acrobatics to an arresting ‘whoa!’ as we see the northern lights set fire to the sky occur in every life at every age and in every culture. In simplest terms, wonder triggers not a different way of looking at the world but a different way of being in the world. Captivated by turtles or struck dumb by a sunrise, we are not thinking about these scenes. We are in them. As Iain McGilchrist explains in Ways of Attending, our brain must operate in these two different ways. One way experiences the immediacy of life. The other stops life’s chaotic flow, breaks it up into ‘things’ and events, and analyses them. Wonder occurs when we are swept into life as unselfconscious participants. And yes, wonder gives us more than joy.

Working fifty years ago, the psychologist Abraham Maslow gathered accounts of what he called ‘peak experiences’. His respondents valued these moments of ‘highest happiness’. Peak experiences, they believed, also gave them a glimpse of the true world and their true self. They felt fully integrated in a unified world. ‘All is well,’ they told Maslow. ‘I need nothing more.’ Maslow believed these insights changed their lives.

In the 1990s, a second wave of interest examined how awe changes our behaviour. Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, described many of these in Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. Defining awe as ‘the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world’, he believes, like Maslow, it gives us a way to experience fundamental truths about the world and our place in it. His work shows that under the influence of wonder, we are measurably more helpful to each other and to the environment, including non-human beings. Keltner hypothesised that the evolutionary point of awe was to enhance solidarity among people. In my opinion, our ability to feel part of the natural world offers a still greater reward.

With one exception, psychology’s understanding of awe fits my own. Being hit on by a turtle or finding myself surrounded by a thousand young perch drew me into another world and another way of being. The joy I felt in these moments of pure participation was so intense that without thinking I wanted to help every one of my fellow pond citizens. In addition, my picture of the world felt more solid and certainly more hopeful. Although Keltner’s studies of college students concluded that most moments of awe occur in social situations, I experienced the opposite. Clearly both occur.

Although wonder was having a positive effect on my life, an odd contradiction remained. I counted certain turtles as friends but not the reverse. All my relationships with nature were one-way streets.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, a collection of essays by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Native American professor of botany, Kimmerer describes a telling moment in her classroom. She asked how many students loved nature. Every arm shot up. Then she asked how many felt nature loved them back. No one moved.

Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.

Here was a question I hadn’t dared to ask. Did turtles love me back?

‘Of course not!’ snapped the logician in my mind. ‘They’re just being turtles.’

IT WAS STILL raining lightly as my car sloshed through flooded potholes down to one of my favourite ponds. Thunder rumbled. I fell into water as dark as a storm cloud and waited for my eyes to adjust. I was looking for a sign.

I had no trouble finding turtles that afternoon. When a pair of young turtles came paddling up to float at the surface and climb on my arm, I asked them if they would help me if I started to drown. The first turtle telescoped his neck upward to take a breath. The second disappeared.

‘That was a no,’ I answered for them and kept looking.

Slowly I continued around the pond asking everything I saw if turtles loved me. Coming upon a big musk turtle with the yellow and white snout of a senior citizen, I went into my usual routine. I hovered quietly above him and sent my kindest turtle thoughts down through the water.

‘What a handsome turtle you are,’ I exclaimed. ‘Long life to you.’ He didn’t move a muscle. I tried backing away. I wiggled my fingers.

‘I wouldn’t want to live in a world without turtles,’ I beamed in case that made a difference. His eyes flickered, but he didn’t leave the bottom. Giving up, I dived down and took a close look at the right side of his neck. It was smooth. Even though I hadn’t seen a turtle I called Silver Patches for several years and feared he was dead, I couldn’t help checking every old male I encountered just in case it was my friend. I would know him by his bulging goiter. The memory of the time I failed to recognise Silver Patches before he recognised me still guided my behaviour. I kept checking.

As I popped to the surface, it struck me that this was the sign I was looking for. Turtles and I both made a consistent effort to find each other. The more often I saw them at five in the afternoon in weedy areas, the more often I swam at exactly that time of day near plants and drowned trees. In return, the more often they saw me, the more likely they were to swim up. In one case, it took ten years of flirting to get a turtle to sit in my hands. Every one of the turtles I knew eventually went out of their way to hang out with a member of another species for no obvious gain. No food. No protection. At the very least we must like each other. By this time I was familiar with the love language of reptiles. Turtle friendships consist of hanging out with others without biting, whacking or constantly trying to have sex.

For a moment I raised my head and gazed blankly over the pond. Could I really say turtles liked me back? Loved me?

‘Pretend you’ve never seen these things before,’ I heard again. ‘They are strange, foreign objects and you are the first to discover them. What do you see?’

It was easy for me to see in memory the hundreds or even thousands of mimed conversations I’d had with turtles. I’d been stopped, poked, tapped, fought over, sat on and courted. During those same years I had swum with other people enough to know that turtles didn’t play with everyone who came along. There was no instinct that drove them to do so. Like me, they chose to pay attention to familiar beings who took an interest in them. This was a relationship – a two-way street. I was swimming in a great river of potential companions.

I had turtles to thank for this life-changing realisation. They were the beings who got me to pay attention, crawl out from under my assumptions and interact with the natural world on vastly different terms. They showed me that every being has the ability to respond in its own way and that hope as well as joy comes from the relationships I hadn’t believed were possible.

I am not a person who changes her mind easily, and it was hard to unlearn the ‘facts’ about the unbridgeable differences that we assume exist between people and the rest of nature. But after years of paying close attention to turtles, and after the exhausting discipline of forgetting what I thought I knew, and after letting myself fall a little bit in love with them, I have moved into that strange and beautiful place I discovered eighteen years ago where I feel beautiful too.

References  

Dacher, Keltner (2023). Awe: the New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. USA: Penguin Press. 

Kimmerer, Robin Wall (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minnesota: Milkweed editions. 

Maslow, A. H. (1970). Religions, Values and Peak-Experiences. New York: The Penguin Group. 

McGilchrist, Iain (2019) Ways of Attending:How Our Divided Brain Constructs the World. New York: Routledge. 

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